Dalton Park has achieved a 2-Star Fitwel Certification, recognising two years of work to improve health, wellbeing and sustainability for its employees, retail partners and visitors, giving HR and facilities teams working in shared retail environments a verifiable benchmark for embedding wellbeing standards into physical workplaces. No deal consideration applies, as this is a certification rather than a transaction.

Dalton Park is a shopping outlet centre in Murton, County Durham, attracting millions of visitors each year. Financial figures are not publicly available.

Savills is the global real estate advisor managing Dalton Park on behalf of its owners.

The strategic logic positions employee wellbeing as a facilities and estate management metric, not solely an HR policy lever. Fitwel's certification criteria, spanning sustainable travel, biodiversity, environmental management, employee wellbeing and workplace facilities, extend workplace wellbeing standards beyond office environments into shared retail and multi-employer settings.

Richard Kaye, centre manager at Dalton Park, said the certification reflects the team's commitment to continually improving Dalton Park for everyone who spends time here, whether that's our employees, retail partners or the millions of visitors who choose to shop with us each year. Maria Garcia, ESG director at Savills, called the achievement a testament to the passion, dedication and hard work of the entire team, adding that it sets an example for the industry.

The structural driver is the growing use of internationally recognised healthy building certifications, such as Fitwel, as due diligence and ESG benchmarks for commercial property, pushing landlords and asset managers to formalise wellbeing provision as part of asset value rather than discretionary CSR spend.

For the sector, the case shows how a single, third-party building certification can give HR and facilities functions across multiple tenants a shared, verifiable wellbeing benchmark, without each individual employer needing to run its own assessment process. As healthy building standards spread across retail and mixed-use estates, this shared-certification model looks likely to become a more common route to demonstrating workplace wellbeing commitments.

Source: Yahoo News UK / The Northern Echo